Abstract

The paper presents the results of computational fluid dynamics modeling of the performance of two centrifugal impellers with low inlet flow coefficients. The first impeller with the flow coeffi- cient of 0.024 had nine main and nine splitter blades and the outlet diameter of 447 mm. The second one differed from the first one only by the lack of the splitters, 18 main blades were used instead. The numerical simulations were verified by the experimental measurements performed on a corresponding test rig. The measurements show better performance characteristics of the impeller with splitters. The main aim of the numerical research, therefore, was to identify the reasons for the existing differences in the performance of the impellers.